The story of the Jewish experience in the Libyan concentration camp at Giado will finally be told in a new book by Eric Salerno to be published this month.
The book, in Italian and titled Uccideteli tutti ("Kill them all") echoes the words of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, who ordered that all the Jews of Cyrenaica, then subject to Italian Fascist racial laws, be rounded up and interned in 1943. Hundreds died of starvation and disease - especially the young and the old. Others were deported to Italy and then delivered into the hands of the SS in Germany.
This neglected chapter of the Holocaust is told through interviews with survivors in Italy, the US and Israel. An appendix lists the names of the thousands who were interned at Giado.
Eric Salerno has been the Middle East correspondent of the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero for 20 years. He divides his time between Rome, Melbourne and Jerusalem.
Uccideteli tutti: Libia 1943: gli ebrei nel campo di concentramento fascista di Giado di Eric Salerno ( Il Saggiatore) 17 euros.
Many years prior to this, concentration camps were used by fascist Italy to control and exterminate the general population of Libya (1929 or so) as well.
ReplyDeleteWill it kill you to mention even in passing the hundreds of thousands of Arab/Berber Libyans exterminated by the Italians under the leadership of Grazianni, infamously known as butcher of Libya?
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to scholar Sa;erno, he wrote a book about Italian atrocities in Libya including the concentration camps. His is titles Genocidio in Libya. The Libyan concentration camps were larger and not less than half a million dies in them out of programmed starvation, lack of medicine, diseases. This is part of the Civilizing Mission Italy promised for Libya. S.M.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in the fate of the Libyan victims of Grazziani's Libyan Concentration Camps in Cyrenaica between 1929 and 1934, and this led me to your blog. No people deserve to be treated as such because of race or religion. My symphathy finds no difference between unjustice being done to Libyan moslem or jew, between an arab jew or a palestinean, how people can correct all this?
ReplyDeleteWould it hurt the anonymous people to mention the fact or acknowledge the systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews by Muslim Arabs? This blog is about Jewish refugees from the Middle East. They are not "Arab"-- they were known as Jews first and foremost despite their Middle Eastern roots.
ReplyDeleteThis blog is obviously not about ethnic Libyans who fought the Italians during fascism. It is so clear and to suggest otherwise through anonymous commenting is disingenuous. Unlike the strife between Italy and Libya, the issue of the persecution of Jews in their native Eastern lands has been swept under the rug.